Professional Grievers- Mickey J Corrigan

Until he gets hired to attend funerals for Florida's most unpopular dead people, Seymour Allen has no life. When he meets a mobster's gorgeous girlfriend, things begin to heat up.

 

They say opposites attract. Professional Grievers mates noir with romance, a beautiful young woman with a depressed older man, and humor with pathos to create a surprising, funny, sexy little love story.

 

Seymour Allen's life had ground down to a dull bore. Lonely, self-medicating, and wallowing in self-pity, he's in dire need of a stiletto kick in the butt. Then the weirdly generous Raymond C. Dasher hires Seymour to attend the death ceremonies of the not-so-dearly departed. As Raymond explains to Seymour, some people have so few friends they are willing to hire an audience for their own funeral. 

Working as a professional griever, Seymour's life picks up. Fascinated and often moved to tears, he frequents local chapels and cemeteries, posing as a bereaved friend of the departed. At an Irish wake, he meets a hot redhead named Yvonne, the former mistress of the deceased; a man with the most dangerous kind of family. Sexy Yvonne needs to grieve her loss and Seymour offers a padded shoulder to cry on. Soon enough their friendship steams up. 

 

You're only as old as you feel, and Seymour feels like a million bucks around Yvonne. Are his feelings for Yvonne enough to give him the jolt he needs to jump-start his life?

 

Professional Grievers is a unique, quirky romance presenting the upside of funerals and a hopeful, tender look at second chances.

Maithili Speaks:

The plot was new. Professional Grievers Inc recruit people who turn up at less attended funerals. The book at some point tried to convey how life is increasingly becoming more about money and how the final goodbye too has become a show of money. If there are really very few people who mourn your death,courtesy you being too busy minting money, you can always pass away as being popular by hiring people to grieve. 

The book tries to touch and incorporate too many ideas which are just touched upon in its course. While I was reading I always had this feeling that there is more to follow but sadly it never happened. The novella, being itself a complete story, could have done with lesser ideas. It ended up appearing like a preview of a novel. 

A few ideas about death and facing it, erotica of an older man and his younger dead girlfriend, gangster mob (which hardly featured in the book) and second romance of Seymour with the partner of a dead gangster were briefly touched and missed! 

Rating: 0.5/5

You expect  a novella to be complete in itself without looking like excerpts of a novel. Which is precisely what the book missed.